You can get a great printer for under $150. And if you know what to look for, you don't have to sacrifice quality. Here are five important considerations:

Color or black and white

This is not as simple a decision as it seems. Consider the types of homework assignments you'll be doing. Will you need to include a lot of artwork, charts or other graphics? Or will you typically work on essays and reports requiring only text? Your decision will also affect the cost and effort involved with ink cartridges later. For example, if black and white is all you need, you'll generally have less trouble and expense. Nevertheless, choose what best suits the schoolwork.

Resolution

A printer's resolution is typically given as dpi (dots per inch). Many budget printers are capable of 600 dpi, which happens to be excellent for professional-looking text documents in all types of fonts. But you'll need better if you're printing photos or photo-realistic graphics. Fortunately, the capacity for higher resolution is usually included with color printers. Look for 1200 dpi or higher.

In general, a color printer's resolution must be higher than the graphics it prints. A typical printer uses only a few ink colors to reproduce digital images, which can involve millions of colors. So the printer might use several dots to blend its basic inks for the equivalent of only one pixel of a digital photo. The quality you get on paper is rarely what a printer's resolution suggests.